Anglophone pronunciation of foreign languages

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The following is a list of common non-native pronunciations English-speakers make when trying to speak foreign languages. Much of it is due to transfer of phonological rules from English to the new language as well as differences in grammar and syntax that they encounter.

This article uses International Phonetic Alphabet pronunciation. See Help:IPA pronunciation key and IPA chart for English for an introduction.

Arabic

• English has no pharyngeal consonants and speakers are likely to have difficulty with the both the voiced and voiceless pharyngeal fricatives.
  • The voiceless pharyngeal fricative (/ħ/) may be pronounced as the voiceless glottal fricative ([h])
  • The voiced pharyngeal fricative has no clear equivalent in English and speakers may simply omit it.
• Speakers may omit the glottal stop.
• English has no voiced uvular fricative and speakers may replace it with [ɡ].
• Arabic distinguishes certain emphatic (pharyngealized) consonants (mostly alveolar) with non-emphatic ones; English makes no such distinction and speakers are likely to pronounce them as their English equivalents.
• Speakers have difficulty with gemination of consonants, which is contrastive in Arabic (i.e. /darrasa/ 'taught' vs. /darasa/ 'studied') but not in English.

Japanese

• Speakers may have trouble distinguishing between long and short vowels. They may also pronounce short vowels closer to English lax vowels:
  • Short /i/ may become [ɪ]
  • Short /ɯ/ listen (help·info) may become [ʊ]
  • Short /e/ may become [ɛ]
  • Short /o/ listen (help·info) may become [ɔ]
  • Short /a/ may become [æ]
• Speakers may pronounce long /ɯː/ with full lip rounding (i.e. [uː]).
• May use stress accent, as is normal in English, rather than the standard Japanese pitch accent, and may replace /a/ with a schwa when making syllables unstressed.
• Standard Japanese postalveolars (the sounds spelled with sh, ch and j) are alveolo-palatal and English speakers may pronounce them as [ʃ], [tʃ] and [dʒ] instead of [ɕ], [tɕ] and [dʑ] respectively.
• May have difficulty producing geminated consonants.
• Speakers may fail to pronounce an utterance-final [ɴ] as uvular and, instead, may pronounce it as a velar nasal.

Mandarin Chinese

• English speakers have difficulty with the 4 lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese.^[1]
• Chinese initials also cause a problem.
  • The aspiration is stronger in Chinese and the English voiced consonants have voiceless Chinese counterparts: /d/, /b/, /g/ are missing in Chinese and are pronounced as unaspirated /t/, /p/, /k/, English speakers often pronounce them as /d/, /b/, /g/.
  • Distinguishing between /tʂ/ (zh) and /tɕ/ (j), or /tʂʰ/ (ch) and /tɕʰ/ (q) is often difficult for English speakers.
• Final /y/ (ü) is often mispronounced [u].
• Final [ɨ] (in zhi, zi, chi, ci, shi, ri) is often substituted with [i] by English speakers.

Russian

• Speakers are likely to have difficulty with Russian's extensive palatalization system. Instead of palatalized sounds they may produce a C+[j]:
  • Speakers of English dialects that have undergone yod-dropping may have more difficulty with /tʲ/, /dʲ/, /sʲ/, /zʲ/, and /nʲ/ (coronal consonants) than other speakers.
  • Most speakers have little difficulty with /fʲ/ and /vʲ/.
• Some speakers have difficulty with the trilled [r] in Russian, especially the palatalized [rʲ] since neither are sounds of English.^[2]
  • Non-rhotic speakers, even after learning the rolled-r, are prone to omit /r/ in such Russian words as удар [uˈdar] ('blow') and горка [ˈɡorkə] ('hillock').^[2]
• Depending on the speaker's dialect, they may have difficulty with "dark l" (that is, velarized /l/, which in Russian contrasts with a palatalized /lʲ/) in positions other than in the syllable coda.^[3]
• Speakers may have trouble with consonant clusters that do not exist in English such as тьма [tʲma] ('darkness'), ждать [ʐdætʲ] ('to wait'), ткнул [tknul] ('prodded'), всегда [fsʲɪɡˈda] ('always'), мной [mnoj] ('me', instrumental), and взморье [ˈvzmorʲjə] ('sea-shore'). Most likely, they will insert an epenthetic schwa.
• Difficulty with Russian vowels:
  • Most English speakers have no [ɨ] (although it is an allophone in some dialects) and speakers generally have difficulty producing the sound.^[4] They may instead produce [ɪ].
  • Speakers may replace /e/ with the diphthong in day. e.g. [ˈdeɪlə] instead of /ˈdʲelə/ дело ('affair').^[5]
  • Speakers are likely to diphthongize /u/, making сижу /sʲɪˈʐu/ ('I sit') sound more like [sɪˈʒʊu]. Some speakers may also universally front it to [ʉ].^[6]
  • Speakers may also diphthongize /i/ in a similar fashion, especially in open syllables^[7]
  • Speakers may have difficulty with Russian /o/, pronouncing it as either [ɔ] or the diphthong in boat.^[8]
  • It is likely that speakers will make the second element of Russian diphthongs insufficiently close, making them resemble English diphthongs (e.g., [druzʲeɪ] instead of [druzʲej]) or pronounce it too long.^[9]
  • Speakers may pronounce /a/ as [æ] in closed syllables так ('so') and [ɑ] in open syllables два ('two').^[10]
• Speakers may also have difficulty with the Russian vowel reduction system as well as other allophonic vowels.
  • Tendency to reverse the distribution of [ɐ] and [ə]. English speakers tend to pronounce [ə] in the pretonic position, right where [ɐ] is required in Russian, while they pronounce [ɐ] in pre-pretonic positions, where [ə] occurs. Thus, speakers may say голова ('head') as [ɡɐləˈva] instead of [ɡəlɐˈva] and сторона ('side') as [stɐrəˈna] instead of [stərɐˈna].^[11]
• There are no cues to indicate correct stress in Russian. Speakers must memorize where primary and secondary stress resides in each word and are likely to make mistakes.^[12]
• Speakers tend to forget to geminate double consonants.^[13]

Spanish

• Some speakers may fail to distinguish between the trilled /r/ and the tapped /ɾ/, making word pairs like ahorra ('save') and ahora ('now') homophones.
• Non-rhotic speakers often omit /ɾ/ in words like carne ('meat') and tercer ('third').
• Speakers may not pronounce voiced stops (/b/ /d/ /ɡ/) as fully voiced. They may also fail to pronounce them as approximants or fricatives between vowels and word-finally (in such positions, /b/ is realized as [β], /d/ as [ð], and /ɡ/ as [ɣ].
• Speakers may pronounce orthographic B as [b] and orthographic V as [v]; or, in an attempt to imitate native speakers, pronounce both as /b/ initially and /v/ between vowels. In most dialects of Spanish, these two letters represent a single /b/ phoneme with an allophone [β]; /v/ does not exist in Spanish.
• English speakers frequently split diphthongs into two distinct vowels, pronouncing words like tienes ('you have') as [tʰiːˈɛnɛs] instead of [ˈt̪jenes] and jueves ('Thursday') as [huːˈɛvɛs] instead of [xweβes].

See also

• Non-native pronunciations of English
• Accent reduction

References

Bibliography

• Gottfried, T.L.; Suiter, T.L. (207-231), "Effect of linguistic experience on the identification of Mandarin tones", Journal of Phonetics 25 
• Jones, Daniel; Dennis, Ward (1969), The Phonetics of Russian, Cambridge University Press